John H. Flores. The Mexican Revolution in Chicago

John H. Flores’s The Mexican Revolution in Chicago: Immigration Politics from the Early Twentieth Century to the Cold War argues that although early and mid-twentieth-century Mexican immigrants to Chicago were racialized and marginalized for decades by the city’s ethnic white establishment and its communities’ working-class Polish, Irish, and Italian neighbors, a significant middle-class Mexican community in Chicago successfully organized revolutionary-based factions and unified in times of pro-Mexico celebrations, standing up to external critics of Mexico or the community. Flores’s book is a “history of the Mexican Revolution as it unfolded on the streets and in the neighborhoods of Chicago” (15). At its core, this book is a study of the role and influence of middle-class Mexican immigrants to the Chicago area—part of the “revolutionary generation”—who developed their political and social beliefs through their “experiences and understandings of the Mexican Revolution” and organized themselves and working-class members of the Mexican community into liberal, radical, and traditional or conservative factions that identified as extensions of revolutionary factions (4). Flores rightfully emphasizes the extraordinary importance of understanding the development of Mexican political communities of the Chicagoland area, because—unlike in the American Southwest—these immigrants organized politically in a space where no native Mexican American community existed. Additionally, Flores emphasizes the fact that middle-class Mexican nationals became community leaders in Chicago much earlier than they did in Mexican immigrant communities in the American Southwest, because the latter dealt with the all-too-real threat of deportation for any Mexican immigrant perceived to be an organizer and politically out of step with U.S. ideologies. Split into six roughly chronological chapters, The Mexican Revolution in Chicago focuses mostly on interwar-era Mexican Chicago.

Economic history · Ethnic group · Ethnology · Immigration · Irish · Political science · Politics · Sociology · White (mutation) · Working class · Communism, Protests, Social Movements · Gender Studies · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies